InsiderOnline Blog: December 2010

Books make great Christmas gifts, and some of our favorite conservatives have some recommendations:

At National Review, Thomas Sowell likesBurton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal for its thorough research and plain language account of President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic policies. Another pick from Sowell is Inside the Nixon Administration: The Secret Diary of Arthur Burns, 1969-1974, which he says reveals “what it means to have a very strange man as President of the United States – something that is all too relevant to our own times.”

National Review Online also has a separate symposium featuring NRO regular contributors giving their gift suggestions. There’s more fiction there than you might get from other political magazines. One of John Miller suggestions caught our eye: Defiance of the Patriots, by Benjamin Carp, is a history of the Boston Tea Party; it might make a great gift for the Tea Party activist on your list.

The Claremont Institute’s list—A Merry Claremont Christmas—provides enough gift suggestions to keep your family in reading material until reading goes out of style. Heck, the list itself would make a good read for a long plane ride. As you might expect from Claremont, the list offers plenty of history and political philosophy; you can also find some fiction, a few books on social media, a book on cocktails, and a book on wine. The Claremont list is a good source of inspiration if your interests run to previous millennia (Wodehouse, anyone?).

Also, The Heritage Foundation offers a Christmas book list compiled from its weekly New Common Sense newsletter. This list is a good source if you have family members who are interested in learning about the history and the ideas of the American Founding. While you’re at it, sign up for New Common Sense, too.